Learning to Stop
Baby Boomers and Gen Xers like to lament about how “kids today” are all obsessed with social media and their phones, as though the older generation sees itself as somehow a world apart: “Whatever those young people are doing, they didn’t get it from us.”
Except that they did. Sherry Turkle, who has written best-selling books on the effects of the digital age on human interaction, relates that many young people told her that they grew up literally pulling at the sleeves of their parents or caregivers, vying for the attention which Mom and Dad had voluntarily given to their texting or emails. Gen Z inattentiveness is just technological karma.
And then along comes that most ancient and most contemporary of concepts – Shabbat. In an age of increasing anxiety and stress, Shabbat is a transformative time period that reconnects us to our families, our friends, our community, and most importantly, to ourselves, whether you live in Toronto or Tristan da Cunha (reportedly the most remote inhabited archipelago island in the entire world). From cooking to conversation, music to meditation, prayer to peace, the genuine Shabbat experience is what the world needs now.
This week as the we roll out another year of Torah readings, we are confronted with a highlight reel of Bible stories – The Creation of the world; Adam and Eve in the Garden; the expulsion from Paradise; Cain killing his brother Abel. But slipped in there so that we don’t lose sight of the need to reboot our lives at regular intervals and simply take in the miracle called our world, comes the call to rest, the invocation of the Sabbath: "And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased [rested] from all the work of creation which God had done."
Rest means far more than the physical stopping of work. Studies show that many of us today feel like we do not have time to actually appreciate the lives we are leading. Shabbat is a designated day of the week to shut out the burdens, distractions and stresses of the previous six days. As R. Abraham Joshua Heschel noted, the meaning of Shabbat is to celebrate time rather than space. “Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time.”
As Rob Muthiah writes in The Sabbath Experiment, we’ve gone beyond 24/7 into the surreal universe of 25/8, a phrase that connotes “an amount of time we cannot actually live in, a pace of life that passes us by, a rush of demands and information that leaves us struggling impossibly to keep up. It signifies a frenzied culture that cares little for human limits or human thriving. It’s a social force that overwhelms, suffocates, crushes. It captures a feeling that many people today live with, a feeling of not being able to keep up with life, a feeling of drowning in the demands of life.”
Shabbat is not a magical solution to these modern urban ills, but it does offer an organic respite brewed from ancient wisdom, an alternative to the frenzy of screens and the unending clock measuring our productivity. Even people who do not feel the need to abide by the halachic requirements of Shabbat recognize the inherent beauty of changing their normal routines and reorienting their inner lives.
Tiffany Shlain, an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, and her husband Ken Goldberg, coined the phrase “Tech Shabbat” where one turns off every possible screen—phones, laptops, TVs, Apple watches—before dinner on Friday night and does not reconnect them until 24 hours later. She says, “I’ve always loved tech and the way it can connect and empower us. But I got to a point where I felt overwhelmed and distracted by it.”
One might ask, if you are not tired on Shabbat, why is it so important to rest? Why not just take a day off whenever you do get tired instead? Why make rest “compulsory,” a moral and emotional obligation manifested through the rituals of Shabbat?
It’s a valid point. But can we trust ourselves to do what we intended, not just to stop working, but to actually replenish at the deepest level? Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz observes that Shabbat arrives “as an obligatory mechanism for self-care and survival. Further still, a complete stop is put upon us on the Sabbath to ensure labor justice (prohibition to work another), animal welfare (prohibition to work an animal), environmental justice (prohibition to work the land).”
But, paradoxically, enjoying Shabbat takes work.
Imagine that you had not planned your wedding at all, not a single detail. You just showed up on the day and expected that the ceremony and afterwards would go like you had always dreamed. Imagine the biggest business meeting of your life, but one for which you did not do any work at all. You just assumed it would turn out ok even if you had not given it a single thought. You figured you’d just wing it with the client.
No, right?
The key to having a joyous and consistently fulfilling Shabbat can be summarized in one word: preparation. Spend just a bit of time during the week thinking and planning your family Shabbat, and the results can be remarkable. So here are some tips to help.
1) Food, glorious food. Whatever it is you like to eat, make sure everyone in the family gets something special that you know they like, and that they know is not available the other six days, but only because it is Shabbat.
2) Give everyone a job. From the parents to the youngest child, design a task for everyone to carry out to contribute to the Shabbat experience. Whether it is shopping, cooking setting the table, inviting guests, preparing a meaningful idea for discussion, thinking of a game – let everyone be involved.
3) Dress Up. Psychology has long known that looking good can enhance one’s sense of feeling good, so let everyone in the family get to strut a bit of their finery on Shabbat.
4) Light Shabbat candles every week, no matter where you are. Whether you are at home, or hiking the Inca trail in Peru, or skiing down the Rockies, or unfortunately, visiting someone in the hospital, when sundown nears on Friday, take out those (portable) candlesticks, and bless the creation and the beauty of existence. And take a moment to enjoy the wonder of it all.
5) Focus on Relationship. Catch up with the people you love. At the Shabbat table, ask everyone the best thing that happened to them this week, and also learn about what they are thinking about and planning. Give your partner and your children your undivided attention. Find one on one time for each of them.
6) Play Games, without technology. Word games, board games and something where we use our creativity, can be an amazing amount of fun as a shared activity.
7) Invite guests that your kids like (or who don’t bother them!). It models hospitality and the gift of sharing, and it opens up your table to different ideas and a diversity of personalities.
8) Praise Shabbat. Just like we try to create positive images of people by speaking nicely about them—think about grandparents and friends--treat Shabbat in the same fashion. Your appreciation will slowly seep in to others. As the poet William Wordsworth once wrote, “What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how.”
Shabbat Shalom!